That point is no longer as important, since as of Gen VIII an evolved Pokemon can learn all of it's pre-evolution exclusive moves via the move relearner, making incense babies have no purpose outside of pokedex filler.
I meant that the existence of the baby mon grants access to these moves to the evolved form as a species. Like, without the baby existing, the original species probably wouldn’t have been given access to Fake Tears or w/e. But yeah, on an individual basis that’s a very good point and another dumb thing about baby Pokémon.
Also, the more I look into incense babies the more I find that they either gave nothing significant to their evolutions or literally gave nothing at all to them (e.g. Mantyke in Gen 4)
EDIT:
Re: IVs, I’ve always thought that, while it definitely wouldn’t solve all the problems, it’d at least feel less like eugenics if every Pokémon had the same total IVs, but just distributed differently. So like, instead of it being 0-31 for each stat independently, every Pokémon would have a random assignment of enough ‘points’ to maximise, say, three IVs. Under this system, trying to get a better IV in one stat would necessarily sacrifice a point in another. So, one Pokémon might have an IV spread of 7/12/19/4/24/27 and another 31/0/31/0/31/0, but the total would always be (in this example) 93.
Of course, there’d still be good spreads and bad spreads for each Pokémon, especially since most Pokémon have at least one obvious dump stat, but it’d at least create some situations where a less minmaxed set of IVs might be preferable, instead of the same ~4 IV spreads being the indisputable best option 99% of the time. It’d also have the added benefit of retaining the in-game randomness, which was the original point of IVs/DVs without necessarily feeling like your in-game team was going to be completely useless in competitive/battle facilities. Plus, it wouldn’t punish casual players nearly as much for getting unlucky with a mechanic they don’t even know exists (not that that’s ever been much of an issue really).
There are problems with this though, of course, like how it hurts mixed attackers, who are already kinda shafted by the current mechanics. It would also benefit stall a lot unless it came with other rebalancing changes.
Obviously this is way too big a change to ever actually happen lmao. It would affect so many other things that it’d probably require a substantial rebuild of stat and damage calculation. It’d just make me less uncomfortable about breeding for ‘perfection’ if I knew that the rejects had relative strengths and weaknesses instead of being strictly statistically inferior.
EDIT 2: I’ve just gotten to the end of this and realised I’m basically saying ‘make IVs like EVs’ lmao. I guess in some ways I feel like they should swap, with EVs going back to a stat exp kind of model.